You will have a tough time avoiding Halo 2 this week. It will be on your TV and on your radio. It will be on your computer. It will be in your newspaper. If you are not careful it will find a way into your morning coffee. The game is riding the crest of an unprecedented wave of promotional hype, a campaign years in the making. Nearly a million units have been pre-ordered and will begin flying off shelves Tuesday morning. At this point, it is an irresistible force. Try to make your peace with that.

As its name suggests, Halo 2 is a sequel. The original Halo, which launched alongside the Xbox three years ago, was a science-fictiony shooting game set a few centuries from now. In it, players took the role of the Master Chief, a genetically-engineered super soldier who wore the very best armour the 24th century had to offer and never took off his helmet.

The enemy was something called the Covenant, an aggressive alien force of nutjob religious fundamentalists whose worldview did not permit the ongoing existence of humanity. Lines were drawn, and guns were too, and in the end, the Master Chief saved the day. Fanboys the world over have been drooling for news of a sequel ever since.

Enter "I Love Bees." A few months ago, a trailer promoting Halo 2 showed up in movie theatres. At the end, the address www.ilovebees.com flashed briefly on the screen. Many curious visitors visited the site, which turned out to be a low-production-values thingy about honey. But after a while, its pages began to break up, as if it were being hacked. Pictures decayed into garble. Cryptic messages about the "Queen" and the "Admiral" appeared everywhere. And, most importantly, sound files began playing out a sci-fi tale in radio drama form. A few enterprising puzzle-solvers decoded some clues, and by August great armies of people were descending on public payphones across the continent, which would ring at appointed times and offer up even more chunks of the emerging story.

What all this had to do with the upcoming game was less than clear most of the way along, but it certainly kept buzz going. This is the level of interest Halo generates: Microsoft can run a cryptic, hostile non-sequitur of a tease campaign for months, and fans will endure it all happily in exchange for a few scraps of information.

Here is the astonishing thing. Even after all that, Halo 2 is still better than any of us had dared hope. It is a masterstroke of a video game, crackling with energy and high spirits and old-fashioned swashbuckling. The Covenant is coming to Earth. Great armies are gathering on both sides. Devastation is certain. This is where we come in.

Like the first one, Halo 2 is a first-person shooter, meaning we see what the Master Chief sees as he runs down corridors with his rifle in front of him. Slimy reptilian Covenant monsters lurk around every corner. We must shoot them dead wherever we find them, and them we must hide behind crates and walls to allow our electric armour to recharge. We must toss grenades into crowds of bad guys, and then we must run for cover. We must find a way to kill those miserable Elite Covenant soldiers, who are every bit as huge and armour-plated as we are, but who also carry giant energized forks that will kill us with a single blow, should we be stupid enough to wander into striking distance. The action is fierce and unrelenting, so sometimes we forget that we can only carry two weapons at once. Our machine guns run out of rounds. Our plasma rifles overheat and somehow, despite our all-powerful armour, burn our hands.

As we run and shoot and hide, pausing to catch our breath or reload our clips, the beauty and the scale and the thing reveal themselves slowly. We see places and characters we have not seen before. We watch cutscenes of politico-religious struggles within the Covenant, and are surprised to find ourselves riveted. We wonder how we got to be the Master Chief. We pick up a Needler and a plasma rifle and plow around the next corner. Sometimes we drive trucks and fly spaceships.

The most astonishing thing about this game is its pacing. We move from insane violence to sneaky games of hide-and-seek to gallows comedy and back to insane violence with deliberate, beautifully-crafted rhythm. The thing ebbs and flows. It pushes hard, then pulls back. It frustrates and it rewards. Always, whether it is playing us a video clip or attempting to disembowel us with an energy sword, it is challenging and surprising. And beautiful.

On a down note, it is three years later and Master Chief has still not removed his helmet. It must smell terrible in there.